(5 of 7)
The Rear-Guard Action. After Bentham, Marx—and the 19th century was marked by the long period of conservative decline. Through it, the conservatives maintained their rear-guard action: Coleridge, brilliantly insisting that society was losing its soul because it was fascinated by means, forgetful of ends; ("Men, I think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.") Sir Walter Scott, defending Scotland's ancient laws against Bentham's passion for reform, warning that local tradition could not be erased without damage, writing the Waverley Novels as tracts for conservatism, as reminders of the moral debt that the present owed to principles of liberty and order won by the past; Disraeli, the supple and imaginative politician, yielding with brilliant grace to necessary change, thwarting the mechanical innovators.
In the U.S., a more lurid struggle was going on. John Randolph, pain-ridden, drink-ridden, drug-ridden, and yet the clearest head in Congress, was fighting for local rights against the anti-conservative growth of central power. John C. Calhoun, quenching his own burning ambition, was busy on his unpopular formulation of minority rights against "the tyranny of majorities." Nathaniel Hawthorne was throwing his almost obsessive consciousness of sin into the bland and smiling face of the growing optimism of his age.
The Tragic Marriage. In Hawthorne's industrial New England. Bentham was triumphant, although never wholly so. The ostensible home of U.S. conservatism moved to the rural South, there to meet its worst defeat. Calhoun had spoken in principle for all minorities, but in practice he spoke for the slaveholding interest. In dealing with the tragic union of U.S. conservatism and slavery, Russeil Kirk, a bold writer, does not firmly grasp his nettle. He sidles away, with a glancing blow at the abolitionist innovators. He had a better case than he makes.
On its monstrous scale, in its time, U.S. chattel slavery was not a conservative institution. Superficially a throwback, it was more truly an innovation, a creature of expediency, begot by the cotton gin on anti-conservative ideas of economic determination. The ante-bellum South prattled Calhoun's words, wallowed in Walter Scott, spoke the noble language of local rights and traditions. But it acted, in the crisis, out of the motives of the pocketbook, according to the way Bentham and Marx said men must act.
Years after Appomattox. a simple, honest and superlatively skillful horse soldier, General Nathan Bedford ("Get thar fustest") Forrest, attended a meeting of Confederate veterans. He listened to typical Southern oratory (Calhoun's principles and Scott's language) on the Lost Cause. Hardly a word was said about slavery. Forrest, ill at ease amid hypocrisy, rose to say that if he hadn't thought he was fighting to keep his niggers, and other folks' niggers, he never would have gone to war in the first place. Forrest was interested in Sambo, not Ivanhoe. The sentiment was not pretty, but at least it was not fake conservatism.
But when the slave power was crushed, conservatism, in mismated union with it, was stricken—and for decades thereafter in the U.S. the central power swelled and the conservative principle languished.